lvxferre

lvxferre , 16 hours ago

If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I'd probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it's too slow.

The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an "I know all 386!" to "...it's a Tentaquil".

Chrono Trigger went from "it's okay, it's fun" to "...I spent my whole life underrating it, didn't I?" So did Final Fantasy VI.

Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

I can't stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

To be honest I was never too much into movies. There's one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it's mostly unchanged.

lvxferre , 19 hours ago

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn't address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like "I asked for 1 ice cream, it's giving me 200 burgers", there's likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like "I asked for 1 ice cream, it's giving 1 burger", that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It's simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

lvxferre , 1 day ago

All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

What you're noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

For a Germanic language like English, "making at home" often involves two things:

• compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like "firetruck" - a "truck" to deal with "fire". You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the "firetruck tire" (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the "firetruck tire rubber quality".
• affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like "home" → "homeless" (no home) → "homelessness" (the state of not having a home).

The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren't analysable as the above because they're typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

Now, answering your question on "why": Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for "posh" concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there's also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.

lvxferre , 1 day ago

Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?

A language is not its vocabulary; that's like pretending that the critter is just its fur.

English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.

lvxferre , 23 hours ago

could you say that town is homelessnessless?

Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:

• That town has homelessnessless.
• That homelessnessless town is nice.

You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example "homeless" is an adjective too, but people can say "the homeless are hungry", as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don't know why.

lvxferre , 1 day ago

Probably ascending in Nethack. With a wizard orc! (Not a good combo, but I'm stubborn.) I even #chatted with Famine for shits and giggles.

lvxferre , 1 day ago

My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What's up with cannibalism, meat is meat!

lvxferre , 2 days ago

They're mostly safe. Don't taunt them, don't get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they'll see you as "safe to ignore".

lvxferre , 3 days ago

Here's a link to the original formulation of Roko's Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist's Burden) is this one.

You know, I've seen plenty variations of Pascal's Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say "it's even dumber than the original".

lvxferre , 2 days ago

Yup.

The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

I've seen worse stuff. I've caused worse stuff.

In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It's completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

Then there's that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things "like a chemist". So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

He called it "bananacello". Everyone else, including me, called it "banana de plástico" (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because "a good chemist likes alcohol" was our motto back then.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

• [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
• [Brito] Quid?
• [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
• [Brito] Nullo modo!
• [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
• [Brito] Nolo!
• [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
• [Brito] Non, non...
• [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Domina Alienis.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

By "the 'w' foreigner word" do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

If Wallace: I could've rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I'd need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn't used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

He's talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

Ah, got it.

The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from "any speaker of a foreign language" to "Latin/Romance speaker".)

Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman "barbarus".

lvxferre , 4 days ago

Next on the news: "Hitler ate bread."

I'm being cheeky, but I don't genuinely think that "Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people" is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it's this sort of shit that I'm talking about. I don't even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it's simply a bloody toy dammit.

lvxferre , 4 days ago

I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She's crazy for this stuff. Story time:

>going to the market with my mum
>mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
>we walk a bit and grab a few other items
>couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
>roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
>they get mildly curious, ask me about it
>trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
>they also noticed that I didn't buy barbecue stuff
>I point to mum and say "the garlic bread is hers"
>mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
>about her breakfast garlic bread
>why she prefers that brand
>how they could improve their own brand
>the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
>months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper

Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don't assume that it's for barbecue. Sometimes it's for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.

lvxferre , 5 days ago

The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

lvxferre , 5 days ago

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you're comfortable with, and that you don't mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let's say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word "chicken". You could do something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/doyTY6e.png

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you'll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with "(ptak)", leaving a blank for a word that you'd be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write "bird" over it and done, another word in the map.

It's important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you're proficient with (it's fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.

lvxferre , 5 days ago

It's kind of funny how extremely similar English and German are, but you notice it only when you neither natively speak. Because of that doesn't the video even off to me sound.

(And yes, I'm doing it on purpose. Why not?)

lvxferre , 5 days ago

The video isn't trying to imitate a German speaker with poor English; it's simply German syntax with English vocabulary.

lvxferre , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

No, the ancients did not "fail to see the colour blue". Nor the Himba, mentioned in the text. Both simply don't assign the shades that you'd call "blue" in English to their own special colour word. Each language splits the colour space in different ways.

I'll illustrate this with an example in the opposite direction - English using a single primary word for colour, while another language (Russian) uses two:

https://i.ibb.co/PwGsv95/colours-russian.png

In Russian, those three are considered separated colours; they aren't a hue of each other, goluboj is not sinij or vice versa, just like neither is zeljonyj. In English however you'd lump the first two together as "blue", and the third one as "green".

Does that mean that your typical English speaker fails to see one of the first two shades? No. And if necessary they might even use expressions to specify one or another shade, like "sky blue" vs. "dark blue". They still lump them together as "blue" though, unlike Russian speakers, and they might not pay too much attention to those silly details.

That's basically what Himba speakers do, except towards all three of them. Here's how the language splits colours:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Himba_color_Names.svg/800px-Himba_color_Names.svg.png

You could approximate it in English as:

• vapa - white, light [anything]
• zoozu - black, dark but not reddish, purple
• serandu - more saturated reds and reddish oranges
• dumbu - more saturated yellows, yellowish oranges, and extra saturated greens
• burou - your run-of-the-mill green and blue

Now, check the colours that I posted with Russian terms. Just like English doesn't care about the difference between two of them, Himba doesn't care about the third one either.

There's also an interesting case with Japanese, that recently split 青/ao and 緑/midori as their own colours. Not too much time ago, Japanese did the same as Himba, and referred to the colour of grass and the sky by 青/ao; however people started referring to the yellower hues of that range by 緑/midori (lit. "verdure"), until it became its own basic word.

That's actually problematic for traffic legislation, because it requires the colour of traffic lights to be 青/ao, and people nowadays don't associate it with green. Resulting into...

https://harrojapan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/traffic-light.jpg

...cyan lights. They're blue enough to fit the letter of the legislation, but green enough to be recognised as green lights!

---

Now, regarding specific excerpts from the text:

Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,” not “deep blue,” sparking his inquiry.

Gladstone (and sadly, many people handling ancient texts) likely had the same poetic sensibility as a potato.

The relevant expression here is ⟨οἶνοψ πόντος⟩ oînops póntos; it's roughly translatable as "wine-faced sea", or "sea that looks like wine". Here's an example of that in Odyssey, Liber VII, 250-ish:

[245] ἔνθα μὲν Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ, δολόεσσα Καλυψὼ 
ναίει ἐυπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεός: οὐδέ τις αὐτῇ
μίσγεται οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ τὸν δύστηνον ἐφέστιον ἤγαγε δαίμων
οἶον, ἐπεί μοι νῆα θοὴν ἀργῆτι κεραυνῷ
[250] Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ **οἴνοπι πόντῳ**

Murray translated that as "wine-dark":

[245] Therein dwells the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas, guileful Calypso, a dread goddess, and with her no one either of gods or mortals hath aught to do; but me in my wretchedness did fate bring to her hearth alone, for Zeus had smitten my swift ship with his bright thunderbolt, [250] and had shattered it in the midst of the wine-dark sea.

Why would be Homer referring to the colour of the sea? It's contextually irrelevant here. However, once you replace that "wine-dark" from the translation with "inebriating", suddenly the expression makes sense, Homer is comparing the sea with booze! He's saying that it's dangerous to enjoy that sea, that you should be extra careful with it. (You could also say that the sea is itself drunk - violent and erratic).

The ancient Egyptians were the first to adopt a word to describe the color blue.

I'm really unsure if this is the exception that proves the rule (since the Egyptians synthesised a blue dye from copper silicate) or simply incorrect.

At least accordingly to Wiktionary, the word ḫsbḏ* refers to lapis lazuli (the mineral) and its usage for colour is non-basic (a hue). The actual primary word for what English calls "blue" is shared with what English calls "green", and it would be wꜣḏ*.

*in hieroglyphs: https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/e8ce25d7-5b40-4438-a1e7-7ca793e2e43f.png

lvxferre , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Dyes play a huge role, but it boils down to relevance.

Dark vs. light is probably the first thing that becomes relevant for us, as the difference is [literally] like night and day; then hot colours (red, etc.) because of fruits and blood. Then the rest.

I didn't dig too much into Homer's usage of "bronze sky" (unlike the wine-faced = inebriating sea), but if I had to take a guess, he wasn't referring to the colour but calling it "glorious", or perhaps a "noble" sky.

lvxferre , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Frankly, I think that the only reason why this is considered "disputed" is because a lot of pedants that gravitate towards classical texts are like Gladstone. They don't see what the author says, on a discursive level; they see individual words, and that screws with their ability to understand metaphors, thus poetry, thus the epics.

For reference. I don't speak Greek, but I do speak Latin. If I were to drink a sip of booze every bloody time that a muppet translated Plautus (a comedian) with unfunny shite, or Caesar (a general) with flowery and convoluted words, my liver would be probably floating the same seas as Odysseus' ship. (It's likely the same with Sanskrit given the egregiousness of "I am become Death".)

lvxferre , 7 days ago

I'm already preparing some simple art to do in the canvas. Nothing fancy, just a few (30px)² pictures. And if people make some Tux or distro logos I'm happy to help, too.

I just wish that people didn't waste SO MUCH FUCKING SPACE with government flags in this sort of online game.

lvxferre , 7 days ago

I get what you're saying; Lemmy is not Reddit, Lemmy is Lemmy.

However, I think that this mostly misses the point. The issue is not to copy neutral-to-positive features from Reddit; it's to copy the negatives, or to fail to implement other positives.

lvxferre , 7 days ago

By far, my biggest issue with flags in r/place and Canvas does not apply to a (like you said) 20x30. It's stuff like this:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fyLQWC9ZKdlhRC6rjqw1Za1mpdc=/0x0:1109x759/2000x1333/filters:focal(556x261:557x262)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24799212/IMG_3496.jpeg\

People covering and fiercely defending huge chunks of the canvas, for something that is completely unoriginal, repetitive, and boring. And yet it still gets a pass - unlike, say, The Void; everyone fights The Void.

Another additional issue that I have has to do with identity: the reason why we [people in general] "default" to a national flag, for identity, is because our media and governments bomb us with a nationalistic discourse, seeking to forge an identity that "happens" to coincide with that they want.

But, once we go past that, there are far more meaningful things out there to identify ourselves with - such as our cultures and communities, and most of the time they don't coincide with the countries and their flags.

As such I don't think that this is a discourse that we should promote, through the usage of the symbols associated with that discourse.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people

I think that this is more of a matter of worldview than where we're from, given that some people in Brazil spam flags in a way that strongly resembles how they do it in USA.

lvxferre , 9 days ago

Yeah. I'm half-drunk but the first thing that I thought was, "I could use some gyros. Preferably with a buttload of tzatziki". (The video is about gyroscopes though. Also cool. But not edible.)

lvxferre , 10 days ago

Brazil ended with a third system: Pix. It boils down to the following:

• The money receiver sends the payer either a "key" or a QR code.
• The payer opens their bank's app and use it to either paste the key or scan the QR code.
• The payer defines the value, if the code is not dynamic (more on that later).
• Confirm the transaction. An electronic voucher is emitted.

The "key" in question can be your cell phone number, physical/juridical person registre number, e-mail, or even a random number. You can have up to five of them.

Regarding dynamic codes, it's also possible to generate a key or QR code that applies to a single transaction. Then the value to be paid is already included.

Frankly the system surprised me. It's actually good and practical; and that's coming from someone who's highly suspicious of anything coming from the federal government, and who hates cell phones. [insert old man screaming at clouds meme]

lvxferre , 9 days ago

Yeah, it's actually good. People use it even for trivial stuff nowadays; and you don't need a pix key to send stuff, only to receive it. (And as long as your bank allows you to check the account through an actual computer, you don't need a cell phone either.)

Perhaps the only flaw is shared with the Asian QR codes - scams are a bit of a problem, you could for example tell someone that the transaction will be a value and generate a code demanding a bigger one. But I feel like that's less of an issue with the system and more with the customer, given that the system shows you who you're sending money to, and how much, before confirmation.

I'm not informed on Tikkie and Klarna, besides one being Dutch and another Swedish. How do they work?

lvxferre , 11 days ago

With two exceptions*, the names are from Roman mythology. So I'd expect the new planet to get a definitive name from the same template. (Please be Janus. It's the gate of the solar system!)

*Uranus is from Greek mythology, with no good Latin equivalent. Terra is trickier; you could argue that it fits the template for Latin and the Romance languages, but most others simply use local words for soil, without a connection to the goddess. That is also called Tellus to add confusion.

lvxferre , 10 days ago

It would, indeed. I wouldn't mind if it was the scientific/"proper" name for Earth.

lvxferre , 10 days ago

How do you pronounce the company name? For reference, Latin "Tellus" would be /tɛllu:s/; the nearest English equivalent would be "TELL loos", I guess.

lvxferre , 13 days ago

For writers, that "no AI" is not just the equivalent of "100% organic"; it's also the equivalent as saying "we don't let the village idiot to write our texts when he's drunk".

Because, even as we shed off all paranoia surrounding A"I", those text generators state things that are wrong, without a single shadow of doubt.

lvxferre , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

3. If you lie about it and get caught people will correctly call you a liar, ridicule you, and you lose trust. Trust is essential for content creators, so you're spelling your doom. And if you find a way to lie without getting caught, you aren't part of the problem anyway.

lvxferre , 13 days ago

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s more accurate than anyone in the village.

So does the village idiot. Or a tarot player. Or a coin toss. And you'd still need to be a fool if your writing relies on the output of those three. Or of a LLM bot.

And it’ll be reliably getting better.

You're distorting the discussion from "now" to "the future", and then vomiting certainty on future matters. Both things make me conclude that reading your comment further would be solely a waste of my time.

lvxferre , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Do you mind if I address this comment alongside your other reply? Both are directly connected.

I was about to disagree, but that’s actually really interesting. Could you expand on that?

If you want to lie without getting caught, your public submission should have neither the hallucinations nor stylistic issues associated with "made by AI". To do so, you need to consistently review the output of the generator (LLM, diffusion model, etc.) and manually fix it.

In other words, to lie without getting caught you're getting rid of what makes the output problematic on first place. The problem was never people using AI to do the "heavy lifting" to increase their productivity by 50%; it was instead people increasing the output by 900%, and submitting ten really shitty pics or paragraphs, that look a lot like someone else's, instead of a decent and original one. Those are the ones who'd get caught, because they're doing what you called "dumb" (and I agree) - not proof-reading their output.

Regarding code, from your other comment: note that some Linux and *BSD distributions banned AI submissions, like Gentoo and NetBSD. I believe it to be the same deal as news or art.

lvxferre , 13 days ago

[Off-topic] As I was reading the comments from a related thread, I noticed that the comments there can be tagged by the community. (See Alfman's comment, being tagged as "verbose"). That would be an amazing feature here in the Fediverse forums/link-sharers.

[On-topic] I wonder if Mozilla was buying time to retract its staff from Russia? Even if not, I respect their ability to revert a decision in a transparent way, and apologise to the community without sounding like a corporate "apology". It shows that they actually care about the principles that they're babbling about, even if they violated them with the temporary removal.

lvxferre , 12 days ago

More like asking them what to do, that wouldn't put either their heads or Mozilla's values in the guillotine. Looking for options.

That's just conjecture from my part, mind you.

lvxferre , 18 days ago

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml's administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It's about transparency; and I think that this wall of text that I wrote about how lemmy dot ml handled ani.social shows it well, as the dispute in question was not political in nature. (I can abridge it at request.)

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to "use lemmy.world instead". I don't have anything against LW's administration, but I think that it's foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation. That instance is already 40% of the MAUs, and hosts the largest comms using Lemmy.

lvxferre , 21 days ago

...frankly, most stuff past gen V.

lvxferre , 21 days ago

Gen7 for me was... meh. I remember being extremely annoyed at the RotomDex telling me what to do, as if it didn't allow me to explore properly. Perhaps because my nostalgia is geared towards the older games (I still play Emerald, to give you an idea.)

lvxferre , 20 days ago

I also think that the power creep started out with Gen4, as it had lots of legendaries and evos for older mons. (There's a literal god there dammit.) However I feel like power creep is a symptom of a deeper issue in the series: it's basically mass production, and for mass production you got a few cosmetic changes from gen to gen but almost no meaningful change in core gameplay. And eventually people like you, @sleepybisexual and me got tired of that "base" product.

lvxferre , 20 days ago

In your case I wouldn't recommend trumpets and water Emerald then, as it's exploration-heavy - there's huge routes, and often what you want is in a specific place. You'll probably have a great time with Gen 4 instead, specially Platinum.

lvxferre , 20 days ago

They're even more exploration-heavy than Emerald. Roughly, the earlier the game, the bigger the focus on exploration, as hardware limitations didn't allow much storytelling.

Also, I recommend playing their remakes instead of the original games; the originals are extremely buggy and have huge balance issues. (For example, there's a shore in Red/Blue that you can use to catch Safari Zone mons. And Psychic mons are crazy overpowered - the only Ghosts in the region are partially Poison, there's a lot of other Poison types, and since Gen1 was before the special split they got huge offensive and defensive capabilities.)

lvxferre , 20 days ago

Yup!

lvxferre , 20 days ago

I don't think that mass production is doing it alone, but that it's a factor. It's what prevents GameFreak from changing the core gameplay of the game; and without meaningful changes to core gameplay, they need to attract players through other ways.

And one of those ways is making the mons of a newer gen stronger than the ones of the gen before. (Another is introducing "gimmick mechanics" that get forgotten in the next gen.)

lvxferre , 20 days ago

The thing is that they're complying with the court case by letter, but not by spirit. Sure, there is a system to report and remove copyright infringement; but the system is 100% automated, full of fails that would require manual review, and Google can't be arsed to spend the money necessary to fix it.